GARDEN GROVE, Calif. — A Southern California woman was in custody Tuesday after authorities said she drugged her estranged husband, tied him to a bed, cut off his penis and put it through a garbage disposal.

Garden Grove police Lt. Jeff Nightengale said that Catherine Kieu Becker drugged a meal and served it to the victim, whose name was not released, shortly before the attack Monday night. Nightengale said the 51-year-old man felt sick, went to lie down and lost consciousness. The 48-year-old Becker then tied the victim’s arms and legs to the bed with rope, removed his clothes and attacked him with a 10-inch kitchen knife as he awoke, Nightengale said.

“He was conscious when his penis was removed,” Nightengale said.

Nightengale said Becker put the penis in the garbage disposal and turned it on.

Being part six of the Live-Blogging Feminism For Real series. For the rest of the series, click on the series tag. For a full explanation of the series, see part one.

This week, the reading from Feminism for Real was four poems by Nimikii Couchie, loon clan from Nipissing First Nation, age sixteen. By her own description, she is an artist who, in addition to poetry, is also involved in dance and music. She works with her grandmother, a professional artist. “For me, writing is a personal expression of who I am,” Couchie writes in her introduction to the four selections included in Feminism For Real (p. 61-65). I’ll share one of the poems, “Crisp Early Morning.”

CRISP EARLY MORNINGby Nimikii Couchie

From up above the crow throws his berries at me.
I lay down beneath the crow
trying to relax,
The bird continues to throw his berries at me,
I jolt, feeling startled,
I feel the cool breeze on the bottoms of my feet,
on the left side of my face I feel the chill wind
from beneath me I feel the cold fresh ground hold me up,
up above the crow continues to throw his berries,
twitching, but struggling to ignore him
the annoying sound gets more violent,
the bird looks angry,
he gets louder and louder and continues to repeat,
He will not stop till I show my anger,
He gets louder and louder and continues to repeat,
He will not stop till I show my discomfort,
He feeds off my anger,
but I will not engage

Last year I blogged about how the Ledbury poetry festival asked poets to reveal their most hated words. This year at the festival, the spotlight was on words and phrases that have become so hackneyed and overused that they’ve lost all their meaning. Favorites—actually, least favorites—included: “awesome” and “thinking outside the box” as well as two of my top pet peeves: “literally” and ”devastating.” Half the damn time when people say “literally”, they’re still just speaking figuratively. “Devastated” is so painfully overused that people say they’re devastated when they’re lost their wallet or their favorite team didn’t make the playoffs.

My nomination, which does not appear in this list, would be “tragic.” Thanks to cable news, every fucking thing is tragic, particularly death and especially celebrity death (Princess Diana’s death? Not tragic.) The word has lost all sense of proportion and veered sharply away from the original literary meaning of tragedy, in which a good person loses everything or suffers greatly because of his hubris, or conflicts with a force greater than himself. Seriously, if I see another local news story hyping “a tragic accident on the Major Deegan Expressway”, I’m going to call the station and freak out. I’m also completely over the word “like”, which only has two legitimate uses, as a verb or as part of a simile. If you use it as, like, an interjection or a stopgap because you’re, like, inarticulate, you need to, like, cut that shit out.

Got a cliche you want to call out? Words that are so overused they should be retired…or at least given a long sabbatical? It’ll be tragic—literally, I’ll be, like, devastated—if you don’t share in the comments.

Street harassment always increases in my Brooklyn neighborhood in the summer. Maybe because it’s hot, maybe because we’re all outside, maybe because women wear shorts and tank tops and skeevy motherfuckers take that as an invitation.

Today I was coming back from the store, nearly staggering under the weight of my groceries, and there were some dudes standing in front of my building who made some kissy noises as I went by. I ignored them. But as I went to open the front door, one of them caught my eye and began to croon, “Ay mamí linda, ven acá.” It wasn’t aggressive so much as just plain skeevy and unwelcome, and since I’d already ignored the kissy noises, it pissed me off that he wouldn’t quit. Also, it was hot, and I hadn’t eaten for a couple hours; it’s a bad idea to fuck with me when I’m sweaty and have low blood sugar. I gave him my best bitch face and yelled, “¿Qué dijiste?”, daring him to repeat it. He looked a little startled and then gave me a conciliatory smile and said, in English, “I just said ‘mami linda,’” like he was supposed to get a cookie for being such a nice guy. He actually looked hopeful, like, hey, he’d gotten my attention and maybe this would end in a date. Frankly, that was what pissed me off the most. I gave him the bitch face again, and said in Spanish “Do you know me? No? Then leave me alone!” and we began to quarrel in Spanglish, at high volume.

Just then, the front door opened and out walked two beat cops from the local precinct. I have no idea why they were there, although there’s a drinks machine in the laundry room and sometimes cops come in for a soda when it’s hot. The two cops looked at both of us, and asked what was going on. I fumed that this guy needed to back the fuck off, he pleaded that he was just being nice and I was crazy, which then led to me cussing him out in Spanish some more. One of the cops said, “Oh, are you Spanish?” to me, which I took to mean my cussing at least sounded fluent. I didn’t answer the question, because I didn’t want it to seem like I was just some white chick being snooty about non-white men, which is often how people dismiss my anger about harassment, as though I wouldn’t complain if the harasser was white (which I have plenty of times when I lived in white neighborhoods, but where I live now is almost exclusively non-white, so the neighborhood skeevsters usually are, too). I just told the cops–both of them Asian, for the record—that I was pissed about the disrespect and the way he kept doing it even after I didn’t respond. The other cop said to the harasser, “Look, my man, you can’t just act that way to women walking down the street.” The other said to me, “We got this. Why don’t you go inside?”

At this point, I had cooled off a little and was concerned about my ice cream melting, so I picked up my bags, shot one last stare of death at the harasser, and went inside. I sort of hung out around the entrance—they couldn’t see me—and listened to the cops explain politely, but in no uncertain terms, that the dude needed to leave women alone, that what he was doing was wrong, even if he thought it was just being friendly. I’m not normally a fan of the NYPD—the recent NYPD rape case has really soured me, and the precinct where I live has never quite lived down its reputation for police brutality—but in this case, those guys got it right.

Hey, gals. I was off to Colorado for the holiday weekend, meeting my newest relative (Niece born around Xmas) and spending some quality time w/ the BroDork branch. It was (mostly) awesome. Hot, but Colorado hot, meaning bearable in the shade. (I of course didn’t stay in the shade, and now have blistery, red, peeling stripes on my shoulders, but that’s another post for another time.)

But back to NYC, it’s HOT AS BALLS. (And I mean “hot” like sweaty-gross, not rawr-rawr!) Hot, sticky, oppressive, gross. June was reasonably mild, with only a few sweltery days, but now we’re in for it.

I don’t do so well in the heat. I act like a lot of animals do in extreme cold: I slow waaaaaaay down. I try not to move too much, and eating becomes almost optional, mostly because eating means cooking, and cooking means using heat-generating appliances. Which is a damn shame, because: FOOD!

About a month ago, I picked up a copy of Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue(New York: Touchstone, 1999) on one of the $1.00 used book carts Hanna and I haunt here in Boston. I’d been hearing about the book since its release a dozen years ago: Shalit was one of the first, and youngest, writers to publish a polemic against “hook up” culture and its supposed negative effect on young people — young women particularly. “Here it is for a dollar,” I thought, “I should really sit down and read the thing so I know what I’m talking about if I ever need to discuss it.” (Thus the inherent danger of dollar carts in relation to bookshelf space.)

It took me only a couple of days to read (and heavily annotate — at one point Hanna actually physically removed it from my hands after I read her a passage and threatened to hide it from me) but I’ve been sitting on my notes for a month, uncertain how to write it up. It would be easy to spend the review making fun of Shalit’s caricature of feminism, or her gloss of historical concept(s) of modesty. Or to be angry at her judgmental attitude toward people whose experience of sexuality is different from her own. Or her desire to control a whole culture to suit her own ends. It would also be fairly simple to dismiss Modesty as an out-dated debut polemic by an aspiring writer in her early twenties, something calculated to ignite debates about the harm feminism and/or the sexual revolution has or hasn’t caused young women (it’s always young women …). Not that Shalit, now in her mid-thirties, seems to have changed her tune much. But I really didn’t want to write any of those reviews. Or rather, in the moment I did. I totally did. My marginalia toward the end devolved into such insightful comments as “I…what?” and “um…suck it up?” and “who has a shitty view of men now?” But I also felt that such a shredding of Shalit-as-author would fail to address the questions that Shalit-as-person was raising in Modesty. Even though Shalit and I have vastly different experiences and perspectives (though less different than perhaps one would assume … more on that below), one of the tenets of feminism, at least as I subscribe to it, is that each person’s individual experience and voice has value. I might strongly disagree with Shalit’s approach (and I will so disagree with her below), but I still felt I owed the book a review that acknowledged the problem that Shalit identified for herself, and the solution she came up with to solve that problem.

The fact that Shalit herself anticipated a callous response from from sexual liberals and feminists — describing in the text how her own desire for sexual privacy was labeled pathological and/or laughable by her college classmates and faculty — also made me stubbornly resistant to confirming Shalit’s beliefs about how people who disagreed with her would react to her words.

So what was the central problem that Shalit identified, and what was the solution she proposed? And what were the problems that I had with the text?

Not white men who got away with killing black people during Jim Crow (and beyond)?

Not the countless cops who get away with murder?

The Casey Anthony verdict.

If that is what shook your faith in the U.S. justice system, you have not been paying attention.

I cannot fathom why this case in particular has entranced and enraged people so. One of my Facebook friends changed her user picture to a photo of Caylee Anthony, the deceased toddler, and posted that she has done so to protest the miscarriage of justice in Florida. I just cannot relate to whatever it is she’s feeling. I believe the desire to Punish The Slut motivates a lot people who are obsessed with the Anthony case, especially because the victim was a little white girl. It does seem like most of the folks I know who are up-in-arms about it are women who “just can’t understand how a mother could murder her child!” Good Mommies distancing themselves from the Bad Mommy.

If Casey Anthony killed her kid, she is not the first person in the U.S. to get away with murder and she will not be the last. Let’s move on.

Being part five of the Live-Blogging Feminism For Real series. For the rest of the series, click on the series tag. For a full explanation of the series, see part one.

Welcome back from the holiday weekend folks (if you live in one of those places where this weekend was a holiday weekend of one sort or another. I can’t say we did much in my house by way of U.S.ian independence day celebrating, but we did watch (once again) the end of Dr. Who season five which was — as it has been the previous two times we saw it — in all ways awesome. (We haven’t seen any of season six yet, so no spoilers please.

Anyway. To the business at hand … live-blogging part five of Feminism For Real: Louis Esme Cruz’s essay “Medicine Bundle of Contradictions: Female-man, Mi’kmaq/Acadian/Irish Diasporas, Invisible disAbilities, masculine-Feminist.” In this piece, Cruz tackles gender and racial identity in all of its complexity, thinking out loud (or on paper) about what it means to embody all of the aspects of self that his essay title lays out before us.

I know people were expecting to be all like, Happy Canada Day! But truth be told, I’m over it. That and it’s my dad’s birthday. I have things to write about, I really do. But I gotta be honest when I say I feel like crap. I went to bed the other night thinking I’m gonna suck it up and do some epic posting of doom, but when I woke up yesterday I was greeted to a day that topped 44 Degrees Celsius. I am too heat brained to convert that for my American folks here, but let’s just say that with the humidity and no A/C in my house, it was really fucking hot. We went through probably $40 we didn’t have on cold things to eat and ended up ordering takeout we couldn’t afford because even the microwave added to the grossness. My day consisted of lying on a too warm couch, taking a cold shower, lying back on said couch, soaking my feet in cold water, going back to the couch…well, you get the idea. All while PMSing and trying to keep the little ones cool. This led me into thinking some really, really stupid shit that will either amuse, confuse or identify with people.

Anna: so basically, it’s not about the woman’s story about the actual alleged rape changing or lacking credibility … it’s that she no longer fits the profile of the perfect victim. ARGH. Hate this shit.

Anna: (one minute later) even if she’s an illegal immigrant or has been involved in other, totally unconnected criminal activities, that doesn’t mean she can’t be raped and doesn’t deserve to be protected or recompensed after it happens. ARGH.

Hanna: (as always, honing in on the political strategery) well, in larger terms: they manuevered the french woman they wanted into his job; his political career is finished. he no longer needs to go to jail at all. therefore why bother?

Anna: ARGH.

As I write this post at 3:50pm, The Guardian is making further claims about how tightly the worries about the accuser’s credibility are linked to the actual case. So this is obviously a still-unfolding story and none of us Harpies have time for trenchant analysis today. For now, I want to share a couple of trenchant blog posts that tackle the issue of accuser credibility in sexual assault cases, and the practical reality that our judicial system basically demands a perfect victim in order to consider the accusation of sexual assault worthy of full consideration.

The Doctor, Donna, and Agatha Christie in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" (4.07)

It’s summertime, and in addition to being the season for certain movies it is also (for many of us) the season for certain books or certain types of reading (i.e. beach or other leisure-reading-spot-of choice). I’m pretty eclectic in my leisure reading, and these days seem mostly to gravitate toward nonfiction. However, I am also a fan of work across pretty much every genre. I thought for this edition of Thursday Night Trivia I’d share a few of my favorite mystery series … and get y’all to chime in on what amateur or not-so-amateur detectives you find satisfying to read.

1. Gideon Oliver (Aaron Elkins). Before there was Bones, there was Gideon Oliver. Oliver is a forensic archeologist who would love to spend his time working with the remains of long-dead people from ancient civilizations … but more often then not finds himself dragged in to consult on a modern-day crime scene. Elkins is also the author of two other series, one featuring an art historian and one a golf pro (co-authored with his wife), both of which are fun as well. I also enjoyed his free-standing novel/mystery Loot which is about the plunder of European art during WWII.